Robotic systems deployed in assistive, caregiving, and socially embedded settings must often navigate competing ethical considerations such as safety, autonomy, dignity, and well-being. Yet formal decision-making models frequently collapse these considerations into a single scalar objective, obscuring the plural and stakeholder-dependent nature of ethical choice. In this paper, we argue that Beneficent Intelligence (BI) provides a compelling normative foundation for ethical robot decision-making, and that pluralistic multi-objective decision-making provides a natural formal language for expressing it. We formalize BI using a shared space of morally relevant values together with stakeholder-specific utility functions over that space, and we use the utility-based taxonomy to place this formulation within existing team-reward utility models. Building on this formalization, we derive a set of representation results showing that full-pluralist ethical objectives cannot, in general, be reduced to a single linear scalarization of values or to mere averages over stakeholders without loss. These results highlight how pluralistic decision-making differs from standard single-objective optimization and suggest that multi-objective formulations are better suited for modeling socially embedded robotic assistance.

Robust adaptation in multiagent settings requires learning not just a single optimal behavior, but a repertoire of high-performing and diverse team behaviors that can succeed under environmental contingencies. Traditional multiagent reinforcement learning methods typically converge to a single specialized team behavior, limiting their adaptability. Recent approaches like Mix-ME promote behavioral diversity but rely solely on evolutionary operators, often resulting in sample-inefficiency and uncoordinated team composition. This work introduces Multiagent Sample-Efficient Quality-Diversity (MASQD), a learning framework that produces an archive of diverse, high-performing multiagent teams. MASQD builds on the Cross-Entropy Method Reinforcement Learning algorithm and extends it to the multiagent setting by representing teams as parameter-shared neural networks, directing exploration from previously discovered behaviors, and guiding refinement through a descriptor-conditioned critic. Through this coupling of anchored exploration and targeted exploitation, MASQD produces functional diversity: teams that are not only behaviorally distinct but also robust and effective under varied conditions. Experiments across four Multiagent MuJoCo tasks show that MASQD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both team fitness and functional diversity.

To coordinate in multiagent settings characterized by multiple objectives, asymmetric agents (agents with distinct capabilities and preferences) must learn diverse behaviors to balance trade-offs between agent-specific and team objectives. Hierarchical methods partially address this by leveraging a combination of Quality-Diversity methods that illuminate the behavior space and evolutionary algorithms that use non-dominated sorting over the explored behaviors to improve coverage in the objective space. However, optimizing diverse behaviors and trade-offs in isolation is susceptible to producing egocentric behaviors that favor agent-specific objectives at the cost of team objectives. This work introduces the Multi-Objective Informed Island Model (MOI-IM), an asymmetric multiagent learning framework that fosters diverse behaviors and rich inter-agent relationships, necessary to balance potentially conflicting and misaligned objectives. An evolutionary algorithm improves coverage in the objective space by evolving a population of teams, while a gradient-based optimization infers and progressively explores the behavior space by fluidly adapting search to regions that produce policies with non-dominated trade-offs. The two processes are coupled via shared replay buffers to ensure alignment between coverage in the behavior and objective space. Empirical results on an asymmetric multi-objective coordination problem highlight MOI-IM’s ability to produce teams that can express diverse trade-offs and robust relationships required to balance misaligned objectives.

In multiagent systems that require coordination, agents must learn diverse policies that enable them to achieve their individual and team objectives. Multiagent Quality-Diversity methods partially address this problem by filtering the joint space of policies to smaller sub-spaces that make the diversification of agent policies tractable. However, in teams of asymmetric agents (agents with different objectives and capabilities), the search for diversity is primarily driven by the need to find policies that will allow agents to assume complementary roles required to work together in teams. This work introduces Asymmetric Island Model (AIM), a multiagent framework that enables populations of asymmetric agents to learn diverse complementary policies that foster teamwork via dynamic population size allocation on a wide variety of team tasks. The key insight of AIM is that the competitive pressure arising from the distribution of policies on different team-wide tasks drives the agents to explore regions of the policy space that yield specializations that generalize across tasks. Simulation results on multiple variations of a remote habitat problem highlight the strength of AIM in discovering robust synergies that allow agents to operate near-optimally in response to the changing team composition and policies of other agents.

Identifying covariate shift is crucial for making machine learning systems robust in the real world and for detecting training data biases that are not reflected in test data. However, detecting covariate shift is challenging, especially when the data consists of high-dimensional images, and when multiple types of localized covariate shift affect different subspaces of the data. Although automated techniques can be used to detect the existence of covariate shift, our goal is to help human users characterize the extent of covariate shift in large image datasets with interfaces that seamlessly integrate information obtained from the detection algorithms. In this paper, we design and evaluate a new visual interface that facilitates the comparison of the local distributions of training and test data. We conduct a quantitative user study on multi-attribute facial data to compare two different learned low-dimensional latent representations (pretrained ImageNet CNN vs. density ratio) and two user analytic workflows (nearest-neighbor vs. cluster-to-cluster). Our results indicate that the latent representation of our density ratio model, combined with a nearest-neighbor comparison, is the most effective at helping humans identify covariate shift.

Multi-robot teams have been shown to be effective in accomplishing complex tasks which require tight coordination among team members. In homogeneous systems, recent work has demonstrated that “stepping stone” rewards are an effective way to provide agents with feedback on potentially valuable actions even when the agent-to-agent coupling requirements of an objective are not satisfied. In this work, we propose a new mechanism for inferring hypothetical partners in tightly-coupled, heterogeneous systems called Dirichlet-Multinomial Counterfactual Selection (DMCS). Using DMCS, we show that agents can learn to infer appropriate counterfactual partners to receive more informative stepping stone rewards by testing in a modified multi-rover exploration problem. We also show that DMCS outperforms a random partner selection baseline by over 40%, and we demonstrate how domain knowledge can be used to induce a prior to guide the agent learning process. Finally, we show that DMCS maintains superior performance for up to 15 distinct rover types compared to the performance of the baseline which degrades rapidly.